


Vivid

by abundantlyqueer



Series: Sniper Sight AU [7]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-05
Updated: 2004-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-13 01:54:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abundantlyqueer/pseuds/abundantlyqueer





	Vivid

Dom likes to think of himself as a problem solver. There are some problems you can really only solve by someone getting shot in the head, and Dom can help with those kinds of problems. Dom's the kind of a guy who always knows a guy who'd be willing to lend a hand, for a fee. Sometimes, though, the solution can't be as obvious as that; sometimes you need someone to do you a favor and just drop fucking dead. Well, Dom can help with those problems too, now that he's met Elijah. Dom gets fifteen per cent off the top of Elijah's fee. But really, he does it for the satisfaction of knowing that he's bringing people together, helping people solve their problems.

Billy doesn't talk much to Dom about Elijah. That's okay, because Dom's got eyes and he doesn't really need Billy to tell him anything.

Dom sees how Billy smiles at Elijah. It starts small, a tuck at the corner of Billy's mouth, and grows until it's shining through every pore of his skin. Dom sees how Billy closes his eyes when he kisses Elijah. Sometimes Dom playfully hooks his fingertip onto the nosepiece of Orlando's shades and tugs them down far enough to see his own reflection gleaming back at him from the ebony-brown mirrors of Orlando's eyes. Dom sees Billy watching, his mouth curled in amusement, but his eyes cut thin and colorless.

The first morning Dom stumbles out of Orlando's room in his underwear, stubble-burnt and bitten and utterly replete with pleasure, Billy smirks at him and tells him there's a shaving mirror on the inside of the medicine-cabinet door in the guest bathroom.

"Mmnung," Dom says, dipping his face into the dark ribbon of coffee aroma twisting up from his mug. After the first bitter-rich sip though, he blinks hard and scowls. "You guys shave with no mirror? I mean, there's none in Orlando's bathroom, I get that, but … ?"

" _Elijah_ ," Billy says gently. "His reflection – "

"But he's – it wouldn't – not to _him_ , right?"

Billy smiles, the way he smiles when he catches Dom thumbing the skin at the corner of Orlando's eyes.

"He doesn't know, and it's not somethin' yeh want teh find out the hard way."

"Jesus. Billy. You mean he's never … he's never seen himself?"

"Wi' shades on, he's seen himself in the mirror wi' good dark shades on. Bu' it's easier teh shave without any mirror at all; why take the risk, y'know? He learnt from Orlando, and they taught me. The mirror in the guest bathroom's the only one in the house, and Elijah knows not teh go in there."

"Jesus. Billy."

"Aye. Well. No one's perfect, isn't that what they say? Well, he's perfect in every other way, so … "

Three days later Dom and Orlando have gorged themselves on each other to the extent that Dom's managed to pull a pair of jeans on and make it as far as the pool terrace while Orlando checks his email. Something suddenly clicks into place in Dom's head.

"Has he seen himself in a photograph?" he asks Billy.

"Who's goin' tah take a photograph of him?" Billy says, half amused and half irritated at Dom's insistence. "Yeh can't look at him teh take a picture. And besides, he doesn't know if it'd work in a picture – or a mirror, or a buggerin' video tape recordin'. He doesn't know anythin' Dom – he doesn't know what color his eyes are, fer God's sake. Let it go, Dommie; it's no' important."

Dom thinks that Billy should never ever lie; Billy's eyes are so clear that when he lies you can see all the way down to the hurt that he thinks he's hiding.

"Sorry," Dom murmurs, but he's apologizing for his lack of a workable suggestion, not his refusal to give up.

A day or two after that, Orlando takes Dom into the guesthouse. Orlando's wearing his tattered jeans and nothing else, and Dom's imagining how it would be to have him here on the scuffed wooden floors, surrounded by the drenching sunlight and the sacking smell of dried clay and plaster dust.

"I stopped working on it because I realized it wouldn't solve anything," Orlando says, making his way to the workbench in the far corner.

Dom thinks about war painting Orlando's satin skin with clay, and then making him arch and writhe until the russet coating cracks and flakes and falls away.

"But it was almost finished."

Orlando feels for the edge of the tarpaulin and throws it back, filling the air with swirling dust that glitters in the sunlight.

"Holy fuck," Dom says. "That's fuckin' brilliant."

The bust, modeled in red-ochre clay, is of Elijah. Dom's glance skims the familiar curves and planes of temples, cheeks, lips, and chin. The subtle curve of the mouth (not quite a smile, but rather the promise of a smile to come) is so realistic that Dom finds himself instinctively smirking back.

The bust has no shades. Given the accuracy of the rest of Orlando's depiction, Dom is quite willing to accept the straight brow bones and large round eyes on faith.

"How did you do it?" he asks, crouching down to put himself on eyelevel with the piece.

"Touch," Orlando shrugs, his fingers molding around nothing between his hands. "Putting my hands on his face, then on the sculpture. Working until the shapes feel the same. But it looks good, yeah?"

"It looks un-bloody-believable. It's beautiful."

Orlando shrugs again.

"Thanks, but … it didn't solve the problem. Still no eye color."

"Yeah," Dom nods thoughtfully.

Dom figures it out while he's showering, standing with his back to the water and feeling the heat digging its sharp little claws into the indents left by Orlando's teeth on the nape of his neck.

There's a hammered glass partition around the shower. Every time Dom moves, light squirms across the surface, ten thousand tiny smears of color that Dom knows are flipped and fuzzed reflections of himself.

There's the same kind of shower enclosure in Billy and Elijah's bathroom.

Elijah is sitting in the kitchen reading the style section of the weekend newspaper.

"You shower, right?" Dom says eagerly, still tucking in the end of the towel around his waist.

Elijah pulls at the neck of his washed out tee shirt and dips his nose towards his skin warily.

"As a rule, yeah, but I just got up an' I thought - "

"Without shades?"

"Well, yeah. There's a reason I lock the door, y'know. It's not like Billy hasn't seen me - "

"With the lights on?"

"Dom, what the hell is this about?"

"The glass enclosure. You look at the glass enclosure and nothing happens to you."

Elijah lifts both hands palm up in a gesture of defeated bewilderment.

"So, it's not like some fucking death ray thing that bounces back off any reflective surface. You have to be able to at least _see_ your eyes for it to work."

"I guess."

"Brilliant. Fucking brilliant," Dom says, turning around so quickly he skids a little on the water he's dripping on the floor.

Billy goes into the bathroom later that day to find Dom, dressed, in the shower enclosure with a tape measure, a bit of paper and a stubby pencil.

"What the buggerin' hell are you up teh?"

"Huh? Oh, I'm thinking about getting a power shower put in here. Orlando's working me over like a piece of fucking steak; I need all the help I can get for the aches and pains."

Billy snorts in amusement and leaves again. Dom, satisfied that he's got the distance between the spot where one stands most naturally in the enclosure and the partition, starts measuring the average diameter of the convexities in the glass.

Billy and Elijah are surprised when Dom declines to join them for a business trip to New York. Elijah tries to persuade him, pointing out how nice it would be for Orlando to have some company, but Dom shrugs and says he's got things to do. Elijah looks almost annoyed, but Orlando's long lingering kiss goodbye to Dom seems to convince Elijah that Orlando, at least, is satisfied enough with the arrangement.

Dom goes shopping. Then he spends the next two days dickering with distances and lights and moving things around in the sitting room. When he gets everything perfect, he draws himself a little plan and records the measurements between everything and then he puts it all back the way it was.

Dom has to wait a few days for an opportunity, a time when Billy can be counted on to be gone for a little while, and Elijah's still in the house. Dom and Orlando corner Elijah and explain the plan, and then Dom and Elijah hastily rearrange things in the sitting room.

"Are you sure this is safe?" Elijah asks, watching Dom fiddle with the camera on its stand.

"The diameter of the lens is less than the diameter of the little bumps on the shower glass," Dom says. "And the distance between it and you is more than the distance between the glass and you, so the reflection's gonna be even smaller."

"I notice you didn't say 'yes'," Elijah says ruefully. "Fuck it. Let's do it."

"Okay. Look, the Polaroid comes out here, and I'm gonna tape this piece of cloth above the slot, see? And I'll put the envelope under here, too. That way, when you're done, you wait for two minutes to let it dry, then you reach round underneath, find the picture by touch, put it in the envelope without looking at it, fold in the flap of the envelope. Right?"

"Right," Elijah nods.

"Great. And don't forget to say 'cheese'."

Dom picks a car parked in a fifteen minute only zone that he knows is rigorously enforced. He shoves the envelope under a windscreen wiper and then moves a few yards away, leaning against a store window to wait. He extracts a pair of extremely dark shades from his pocket and slips them on. He blinks, and resists the urge to just pull them off again; they're so densely tinted that he can barely make out the outlines of things. He certainly can't see color.

Ten minutes later, a guy comes out of the store and goes to the car. Dom tenses, ready to move fast or slow as the situation demands.

The car's owner does a double-take on the thing under his wiper blade, scowling first because he thinks he knows what it is, then because he doesn't. He leans over the car hood and pulls it loose, turning it over to glance at both surfaces. When that doesn't enlighten him, he unfolds the flap and pulls out the contents. He looks it over, turning it face up and face down, bewilderment deepening with every second. Dom pushes away from the store window and crosses to the curb.

"You're not Orlando," he grins.

The confused scowl is directed at him now.

"Sorry, I thought this car belonged to a friend of mine. This picture would have been really funny if you'd been him."

Dom glances down just long enough to extract the photograph from the guy's unresisting fingers along with the envelope. There's a dull sheen off the picture's surface, and a swirl of dark against dim, but Dom can't make anything out of the image through his shades. Dom shoves the photograph back into the envelope and fumbles the flap into position again.

"Thanks, mate, and sorry again," Dom chimes, shoving the envelope into his jacket and walking away before his victim can even think to protest.

Dom returns the envelope to Elijah. Elijah's eyes are inscrutable behind violet smoked shades, but the way his fingers pluck at the envelope's edges tell Dom all he needs to know.

"You could open it," Dom says gently.

There's a long silence, and Dom doesn't know if Elijah's looking at him or the envelope or something else entirely. Elijah shakes his head.

"This belongs to Billy, not me."

Billy's lying on their bed, reading a paperback and curling his bare toes in the comforter. Elijah comes to him and crouches down next to the bed. Billy turns his head on the pillow.

"Hallo, wee thing. What's up?"

"This is for you," Elijah says, handing Billy the envelope.

Billy smiles quizzically.

"It's not meh birthday."

"I know."

"What is it?"

"It's … you know I love you, Billy, right?"

Billy rolls up onto his elbow, his brows furrowing anxiously. The envelope is forgotten in his hand as he leans towards Elijah.

"Darlin', what is it? Is something wrong?"

"No, no. I just … I need you to know that. To see that."

"Oh, I do, darlin' heart, I do."

Billy leans further and Elijah tips his face up and their mouths meet softly, tenderly.

"Open it," Elijah breathes. "I didn't look. It's yours, Billy, only yours in all the world, just like me."

Billy's features flicker again, but he lies back and holds the envelope raised up and unfolds the flap. Elijah turns his head away, staring out of the window.

The paper is cool and slick between Billy's fingertips. His glance flickers over the ghost marks on the photograph's back, and then he turns it over.

Elijah hears the sharp intake of Billy's breath and looks back.

Billy is open-mouthed, wide-eyed.

Elijah's eyes. Elijah's eyes are the most beautiful, intense, incredible shade of –

 

The End.


End file.
